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@desandro
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Bower logo

In addition to awesome docs #228, Bower deserves a proper logo. See below for sketches. I'm curious if you think any of these are worth me putting more effort into.


Take a look at Yeoman right now.

Screen Shot 2013-02-19 at 4 43 10 PM

The other two entities have awesome logos. Bower's got to represent.

Background

@fat introduced me to Bower by showing me this video: The Vogelkop Bowerbird: Nature's Great Seducer. Bower gets its name from the Bower bird, a line of birds who build structures to seduce their mates. As you'll see in the video, the Vogelkop is the most creative in its collection of treasures. It will stash leaves, bottle caps, berries, dung balls, mushroom heads, etc. This is essentially what Bower the project does - putting together a treasure trove of lots of goodies.

The Vogelkop is the best collector bowerbird, but for visuals, I've been drawing the Flame Bowerbird, with its striking red/yellow/green plumage.

Dancers on Fire

YouTube has a whole Smithsonian show just on the Flame Bowerbird Dancers on Fire. Watch 26:33 for a male in 'full twerk', seducing a female. He's presenting a blue leaf, and doing this one-wing swivel move.

Mood

I see Bower as approachable and practical. It works as a lil' helper. It's friendly.

Sketches

Studying the flame bowerbird.

bower sketch

bower sketch

bower sketch

Illustration

bower sketch

bower sketch

Bower sketch

bower sketch

The good ones

Mascot

good bower sketch

This is more of a traditional mascot. That's a blue leaf in its beak. It's doing the seduction twerk.

Geometric B

geometric bower

Geometric representation of a flame bower bird. It's cute cause it's a B. It's simple so it can be reduced to tiny sizes like avatars and favicons. With that B shape, we could do stuff like

bower with a bird b


2nd revisions

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

When we last left off 3 weeks ago, I started taking the Mascot illustration into Illustrator. Here's where that ended up:

bower illustrator

After speaking with a colleague, we concurred it wasn't quite it. While it was certainly a cute bird, there was too much detail and the feet were weird. Ideally, this logo should be the sort of imagery that you can slap on your laptop. It should fit right in there between an Octocat and the Twitter logo.

So I went back to paper, with the task of simplifying the forms.

bower revision 1

Feet removed. Wing detail simplified.

bower revision 2

Extending the body. Giving the torso more shape so it feels like the bird is swiveling around. The head is elevated above the body for more distinct silhouette.

But still, there's something missing from the above illustration. Per Erin, it feels 'embryonic'. Showing the other wing tip might resolve this.

I'm feeling pretty good with the way things are heading. We'll have a logo soon enough.


Vectoring simplified sketch

Bower working vector logo

Here's where I've taken it. This is working for me. But it's not quite 100% perfect

@isaacdurazo was awesome enough to reach out and offer his superb illustration skills. He'll be seeing the logo through to the finish. I'm really looking forward to what he comes up with.

Finalizing

Isaac @ Bocoup collaborated in finishing the logo. Here's where we landed. This image illustrates all the iterations and small tweaks that come with designing a logo mark.

Bower logo iterations

Isaac did a great job of unifying the colors and simplifying the forms. I brought Isaac's contributions into the previous stroked treatment.

It looks rad.

Bower

As a bonus, I've cleaned up all the control points in the illustrator file. In SVG, this illustration is 5KB.

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@xero
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xero commented Sep 10, 2013

great work! 👍
thanx for sharing the SVG

@LaurentGoderre
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Awesome logo!!

@MerlinCalo
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David, I enjoyed seeing the creative process, and learning about the story behind the logo. I think extending the body, simplifying the design, and saturating the color, made a big difference! Credit to @isaacdurazo also, I was not aware that it was a blue leaf the bower bird is holding. I always thought it was a feather too, and maybe there was some connection with Twitter, now I know! Thanks for sharing, and keep up the great work!

@MattArnold
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@KehindeAyanleye
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It's fascinating getting to see the this logo in making. Thanks.

@skullteria
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Thank u, :). This was really inspiring for me.

@MarceloBritoWD
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Very nice job!

@Revod
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Revod commented Jan 25, 2016

amazing!

@adamschwartz
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👍

@altyaper
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Awesome work!

@tnga
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tnga commented Jun 15, 2016

Yeah awesome work @desandro 👍 😄 ! I used your first revision, geometric B for the bowerder project which is related to bower. The rendering isn't exactly the same considering that i made it from scratch, but i hope you will appreciate. I also hope that this decision isn't a problem 😄 !

bowerder-banner

@beeman
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beeman commented May 3, 2017

Very cool to see the progress!

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